Lucebert by Lucebert and translated by Diane Butterman

This is poetry from Netherlands.

Lucebert by Lucebert translated by Diane Butterman is published by Green Integer. This is a Book originally written in Dutch. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781557134349E12.

Lucebert, translated from the Dutch by Diane Butterman, brings Lucebert’s Dutch-language work into English through Green Integer. Published in 2017, it is best approached as a book of encounter rather than as a book to solve. This volume of Lucebert feels like an encounter with a poet who distrusts smoothness, and who lets the lyric scrape, joke, stumble, and flare. I would begin with the poem itself: the image that refuses to behave, the phrase that gives the page a new temperature, the pressure of voice moving from one language into another. Good translated poetry does not only deliver information about Netherlands. It changes the reader’s sense of what English can hold, which makes this volume both a literary record and a readerly invitation.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.